Redskins critic speaks about diversity

Suzan Shown Harjo, the Native American woman who for nearly 20 years has been fighting to have the Washington Redskins change its name, urged a crowd at Cal State San Marcos on Tuesday to embrace diversity, respect one another and end stereotypes.

“There’s no such thing as a good stereotype,” she said, explaining why people shouldn’t dress as Native Americans for Halloween or accept teams that use ethnic groups as mascots.

Harjo was invited to the university for a kickoff event to the school’s inaugural Diversity Awareness Month.

A Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee American Indian, Harjo is a poet, writer and policy advocate credited with helping Indians recover more than one million acres of tribal land.

She may be most closely associated with a nearly two-decade legal fight to pressure the Washington Redskins to change its name.

While she and others have argued the name is offensive, supporters of the team have said it is meant to honor Native Americans.

“The lawsuit I was involved in for 17 years against the Washington football franchise went like this,” she said. “’We’re offended. ‘No, you’re honored.’ ‘We’re offended.’ ‘No, you’re honored. ‘We’re offended.’ ‘Shut up.’”

As an indication of how offensive she finds “the R word,” Harjo said the team’s name only once, in a poem called “After Dinner Remarks,” written for a Latino performance artist.

“We are not the halftime show for the white man’s Redskins game or his Taco Bell-selling Chihuahua,” she recited.

Harjo also recalled a pastor she knows in Washington, D.C. who forbids his congregation from saying the team’s name in church.

“He said, ‘It’s an obscenity, and that’s not proper within the church,” she quoted the pastor. “’You can go into the parking lot and say it, but this is a holy place.’”

Harjo, 69, was helped on stage and sat during her 30-minute talk, speaking in a slow, deliberate manner about her efforts to make people more sensitive and culturally aware.

“We’ve had a lot of luck,” she said. “We’ve eliminated two-thirds of these offensive mascots in American sports. That’s a societal change.”

The ones that still remain, however, include professional sports that are more interested in money and harder to persuade than schools, she said.

“They want to understand how not to hurt each other,” she said about schools.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office cancelled the Washington Redskin’s trademark after the Trademark Trial and Appeals Board ruled the team’s name and logo were disparaging to Native people. However, the move was largely sympbolic — it doesn’t stop the team from using the name or selling merchandise.

The trademark decision was rooted in a 1992 petition filed by Harjo and seven other Native Americans asking the board to cancel the trademark registrations.

The team’s owners have filed a countersuit.

During the years of litigation, Harjo said she often is questioned about whether she has “anything better to do” than to change the mascots of sports teams.

“It’s an important issue,” she stressed. “Why is the stereotyping an issue? Because it’s the context. It’s the prism through which people see us.”

Harjo said she never pressures players to take a stand against their team, and she has tried to persuade fans that it’s OK to love their team but hate its name.

She also said that is not promoting separateness, but distinctiveness.

“We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be part of a great melting pot,” she said. “Someone said, ‘You know what a melting pot does? It heats everything inside to a boiling point, the scum rises to the top, and everything on the bottom gets burned.”

Speaking before Harjo, CSUSM President Karen Haynes said the university’s first Diversity Awareness Month would be an ongoing event and is being celebrated this year with more than a dozen events that will be about racial profiling, transgender people and people with disabilities, among other topics.